Uncertainty and Probability—in Halakha, Thought, and in General—Lesson 20 – Rabbi Michael Avraham
This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The problem of generalization, Hume, and Kant
- Hugo Bergmann’s critique of Kant and an alternative proposal
- Bacon, Carr, Hempel, and Semmelweis: the circle of facts and theory
- Intuition and evolution: a discussion with a student
- Actualism versus informativism and Ze’ev Bechler
- Popper and falsifiability as an actualist route
- The graph of Newton’s second law, Occam’s razor, and the claim of empirical decision
- Getting on an airplane, practical trust, and intuition as cognition
- The subjectivity of intuition and the response, “it works”
- Hume, emotion, intuition, and Eichmann
Summary
General overview
The text presents the problem of justification for generalizations: moving from specific observations to general laws seems like a mental act with no guarantee that it matches the world, as Hume formulated it, and as Kant reformulated it as the question of how we can trust reason at all in describing the world. The speaker rejects Kant’s solution as examined by Hugo Bergmann, and proposes that generalization is not pure thought but a kind of cognition through intuition, “with the eyes of the intellect,” in Maimonides’ language. Through examples from history, medicine, and the philosophy of science, he argues that collecting facts and generalizing are intertwined, and that there is intuitive guidance that makes progress possible. He then presents a dispute between actualism and informativism in Ze’ev Bechler, connects it to Popper, and tries to decide empirically against actualism by pointing to the non-zero success of theories in experiments throughout the history of science, and then returns to the ultimate justification: trust in what appears to us, through the senses and also through the eyes of the intellect.
The problem of generalization, Hume, and Kant
The speaker assumes that observations provide only a collection of cases, and that the move to a general law is a generalization that seems like a mental act with no empirical justification. He brings Aristotle as an example that what seems logical is no guarantee of what happens in the world, and suggests that the right advice is to test intuitions through observation. He presents Kant as someone who assumes that there is trust in generalizations and asks how that trust can be justified, connecting this to the problem of synthetic a priori judgments. He describes Kant’s solution as the claim that science deals with the world as it appears to us, shaped by our cognitive tools, and therefore there is room for general a priori claims about the way the world appears.
Hugo Bergmann’s critique of Kant and an alternative proposal
The speaker describes Hugo Bergmann in his book Introduction to Epistemology as someone who surveys historical answers to the question of justification and rejects them, including Kant’s solution. He argues that there is no reason we would fail to recognize a phenomenon that contradicts the laws of our thought, and illustrates this through the possibility that a law of nature might be different and we could still measure it. He concludes that the question of how products of thought give us knowledge of the world remains a “broken cistern,” and offers one justification: to see generalizations as the result of interaction with the world and not as a merely internal process. He describes generalization as intellectual seeing, “with the eyes of the intellect” in Maimonides’ language, in which a person “sees” what the correct law is and does not merely think it or get used to it.
Bacon, Carr, Hempel, and Semmelweis: the circle of facts and theory
The speaker presents Francis Bacon as describing a work order in which one first gathers data and then generalizes, and argues that this separation is impossible because filtering facts depends on prior theory. He brings Carr, in What Is History?, as an example that in analyzing Waterloo there are infinitely many possible facts, so there must be filtering based on notions of relevance even before the final theory. He presents Carl Hempel through the story of Semmelweis, in which bizarre facts were gathered because there was no concept of what was relevant, until the distinction was found involving students who came from pathology and hand hygiene, which lowered mortality. He concludes that progress is possible because there are prior intuitions that guide which facts to collect and which generalization to try, so generalization accompanies observation rather than coming only afterward.
Intuition and evolution: a discussion with a student
A student suggests that evolution explains why intuitions are fitted to the world and necessary for survival, and the speaker agrees partially but argues that this cannot be the whole explanation. He claims that an evolutionary explanation itself relies on trust in the scientific process that led to the concept of evolution, and without that there is no basis for the original justification. He adds that even in an unconscious process there are infinitely many possible ways to generalize from accumulated experience, and blind evolution alone cannot select in a way that quickly leads to the fruitful generalizations required for survival. He compares this to training a neural network and argues that even there, processed and labeled information is fed in, so it is not a completely blind process.
Actualism versus informativism and Ze’ev Bechler
The speaker brings Ze’ev Bechler, in Three Copernican Revolutions, and defines actualism as the claim that only what is actually present in direct observation is real, and laws of nature are convenient organizational tools rather than claims about the world. He defines informativism as the claim that the additional information in a generalization is a legitimate claim about the world itself, meaning that general laws describe how the world behaves. He argues that Bechler attacks actualism and defends informativism but does not provide a real justification for trust in generalizations, and he connects this lack to what he calls the “mysticism” of seeing generalizations through intuition. He says the dispute seems impossible to decide because scientific practice is identical under both positions, and only the interpretation changes.
Popper and falsifiability as an actualist route
The speaker presents Popper as claiming that a scientific theory cannot be proven, only subjected to falsification tests, illustrating this with the claim “all ravens are black,” which is falsifiable but not provable. He interprets an extreme version of Popper as the view that one can only say that a theory “has not yet been refuted,” not that it is true, and in that way the theory becomes a tool for organizing facts rather than a claim about the world. He explains that Popper is making a normative meta-scientific claim about what science is, not a factual claim tested by experiment. He presents this as support for the actualist direction, in which a theory is retained so long as it is effective in relation to the observed facts.
The graph of Newton’s second law, Occam’s razor, and the claim of empirical decision
The speaker constructs an example of five experimental points in the relation between force and acceleration and shows that they can be “fit” by infinitely many curves, yet in practice one draws a straight line as the general law because it is the simplest. He argues that an actualist would choose the straight line because it is convenient and simple but deny that it is “true,” whereas an informativist would see simplicity as an indication of truth. He proposes a test: according to the actualist, the probability that an additional experiment will fall exactly on the straight line is zero because there are infinitely many possible curves, while according to the informativist the probability is not zero. He concludes that the fact that throughout the history of science many experiments do not refute theories but confirm them is empirical evidence against actualism, because if the probability were zero science would get stuck in constant refutation with no progress. He qualifies this by saying that an extreme skeptic can reject statistics too, but argues that at least methodologically one should adopt informativism.
Getting on an airplane, practical trust, and intuition as cognition
The speaker uses the question “How does the actualist get on an airplane?” to argue that actualism does not fit practical trust in the future, because on that view generalization to the future is made without justification. He argues that a true actualist cannot justify ordinary conduct in the world, and therefore in practice he is “lying” to himself when he behaves as if the theory is true. He returns to his central explanation: generalization comes from contemplation and cognition, not pure thought, and a person “sees” with the eyes of the intellect that the straight line is the correct law. He presents this as a natural continuation of the empiricist acceptance of the reliability of the senses without further rational justification, and extends it by saying that trust in generalizations stems from the same foundation of trust in what appears to us. He argues that in the end every line of reasoning rests on assumptions based on intuition, and so there is no way to bypass intuition except to acknowledge it as the foundation.
The subjectivity of intuition and the response, “it works”
An objection is raised that a person is “the landscape of his birthplace,” and therefore intuition depends on culture and education and is not a reliable basis. The speaker replies that the results of new experiments confirming prior generalizations show that intuition is not merely a product of environment but a cognitive tool that connects to the world, because otherwise there would be no reason for the next experiment to fit the generalization. He compares this to trust in one’s eyes and argues that he has no final rational explanation for why the senses work, only that it is clear to him, and likewise with induction as cognition through the eyes of the intellect. He emphasizes that intellectual sight is less unequivocal than sensory sight, and therefore mistakes and disputes are possible, but it is not a shot in the dark.
Hume, emotion, intuition, and Eichmann
One participant argues that Hume attributes generalizations to emotion rather than to a distinct intuition, and that he still gets on airplanes despite the lack of rational justification, asking for a defense of Hume. Another participant argues that the separation between intuition and intellect serves to suppress emotion and connects this to Eichmann, who according to him acted “in a Kantian way” and succeeded in suppressing emotion in the face of the victims’ suffering. The speaker says he is “completely with him” in the sense that Eichmann erred morally rather than emotionally, and argues that emotion should have influence when it clashes with one’s conceptions. He rejects the idea of opposing Eichmann’s execution, but says that if Eichmann had truly understood that he was wrong and if deterrence were not a consideration, he might have exempted him, and the discussion ends without returning to the topic.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time we dealt with—well, I began talking about the implications of generalization from a philosophical point of view. Yes, after we talked about the presumption created by three repetitions in Jewish law. We saw the assumptions that are always embedded in the process by which we make a generalization. Last time I tried to explain what the justification might nevertheless be for placing trust in our generalizations. So I presented Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori, and I argued that Kant’s formulation of Hume’s whole problem is basically this: how is it possible that we rely on our mode of thinking in order to describe the world? Thought is not supposed to be a tool that contains information about the world. Information about the world we draw from observation, and therefore the process of generalization, which is basically a process of thought—this process is built in such a way that first we examine some sample of cases, and then we generalize on the basis of that sample to a general law. The basic sample we examine by means of observations. In other words, it’s an empirical matter. But those observations give us a collection of several cases. How do we move from that to the general law by means of generalization? The generalization is, ostensibly, an act of thought. And therefore there is no reason to assume—and this is really the translation of Hume’s claims—there is no reason to assume that the product of this generalization correctly describes what happens in the world. It describes how I think, not how the world behaves. In order to know how the world behaves, you have to observe it. The fact that I think something in a certain way is no guarantee that the thing I thought really does appear that way in the world. I think I mentioned Aristotle. Aristotle thought that the speed at which an object falls to the ground is proportional to its weight—to its mass, we’d say today, but no matter, to its weight. And it sounded very logical to him, because the heavier the object is, the faster it ought to fall to the ground. Now to see that he was wrong you don’t need a particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor. What you need is to climb to some high place and throw two stones, one light and one heavy, and see whether they fall at the same speed. An experiment that certainly could also have been done in ancient Greece. But the fact is that it wasn’t done. It wasn’t done because there was no awareness that the fact that I think something is logical is no guarantee that that is really what will happen in the world. It only describes how I think, not how the world behaves. And this example really is an example that shows us just how suspicious we ought to be of our modes of thought. And the right advice is to test by observation. In other words, to test our intuitions by observation in order to see whether the world really behaves the way we think it ought to behave. And Aristotle, who did not yet have empirical awareness, awareness that everything needs to be tested by experience, really did fall into this very basic error. So on the one hand we see that it is hard to trust thought processes. On the other hand, as Kant presented the question, he did not ask whether trust is possible, but how trust is possible. In other words, for him it was obvious that trust is possible, and the whole question is what the justification for that might be. Because he understood that basically all our insights about the world, all the laws of nature, all the general information we hold about the world, are really the result of generalization. And in science and in the generalizations we make, we do place trust. Now of course one can say—someone stubborn will say, okay, we trust because we got used to it, but really trust is not warranted. But Kant asked a theological question, right? I mean theological not necessarily in the religious sense. Theological as I defined the term theological, meaning: I assume a conclusion and I ask what argument could support that conclusion. And when he looked for the argument that supports that conclusion—and I talked about this last time, I’m only summarizing—he basically says that the world with which we deal in science is not the world in itself, but the world as it appears before our eyes. And the world as it appears before our eyes is influenced by our instruments of perception, our cognitive tools, and so this is really the explanation Kant offers for how we can say, a priori, without observation, all kinds of general things about the world. Why? Because those things are actually rooted in our form of thought, but our form of thought is some kind of filter or constraint, yes, a framework within which we perceive the world. So it really doesn’t tell us what happens in the world itself, but it does tell us how we will perceive the world. Since how we perceive the world depends not only on what happens in the world but also on how our perceptual faculties are built. So last time I explained why I said—I mentioned that Hugo Bergmann, in one of the chapters of his book Introduction to Epistemology, surveys all the answers that were given to this question throughout the history of philosophy. He rejects all of them. The only answer some people still believe in is Kant’s answer, but in fact that too doesn’t hold water. Right, I explained that there is absolutely no reason why we would fail cognitively to perceive something that behaves in a way that contradicts the laws of our thought. In other words, even if we say that our thought dictates Newton’s second law, that force equals mass times acceleration, F equals ma, that doesn’t mean that if in the world itself the relation were different—say, force were proportional to the square of acceleration—we would not be able to see the object accelerating in that way. Why couldn’t we? What exactly is the problem? If it accelerates, we will measure the acceleration and we will see that the acceleration is different. It is highly implausible to think that if the law were different, we would not be able to perceive those phenomena. That’s very implausible. And therefore, in fact, we are left standing at a dead end. In other words, the question of how we can trust the products of our thought as tools for knowing the world—that is, things produced by thought rather than cognition, but that nevertheless give insights into the world—what Kant called synthetic judgments, with information about the world, a priori, meaning without observation. I said that the only way I see to justify the trust we place in them is the assumption that these generalizations we make are not pure thought processes. In other words, it’s not something that takes place entirely inside my head. There is also an element here that involves interaction with the world. When I make a generalization, I am in some sense seeing—intellectual seeing, yes, with the eyes of the intellect in the language of Maimonides—I see that the correct generalization is this one. It’s not that I think this way; it’s not just a habit of thought of mine, because if it were merely a habit of thought there would be no reason for there to be a correspondence between it and what happens in the world. But the fact is that there are correspondences—or at least we trust that there are, we think there is such a correspondence—and apparently what we are really assuming is that our generalizations too are the product of observation. Not of thought. We observe the abstract concepts and we understand that this is how the general law has to be. In other words, generalization is usually understood—we understand—I think I mentioned Francis Bacon, I don’t remember anymore—who says that the way we arrive at a scientific law is that we gather data, examine different cases, measure them, come to certain conclusions, and generalize to all cases. In other words, it begins with observation of certain cases and then a thought-act, meaning then comes the generalization. And as I just said, no: the thought-act itself involves some kind of contemplation of the world. It’s not observation first and thought afterward; the “afterward” too, the second stage, when I generalize from the observations, cognition is involved there too. It’s not only thought; it’s also cognition. A good illustration of this is a known problem in the philosophy of science when people discuss Francis Bacon’s description. There are two examples from two different authors I saw dealing with this question. Neither mentions the other, but they are really talking about the same thing. One of them is the British historian Carr, who wrote the book What Is History?, and there he discusses the question of how we arrive at conclusions concerning explanations of historical events. Suppose I want to understand why Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. According to Francis Bacon, what I’m supposed to do is gather data about Napoleon’s army, about those facing him—Wellington and Blücher, yes, the Prussians and the British—and analyze all the data there, and then try to find an explanation for why Napoleon was defeated. But as Carr says, that description cannot be correct. Because when I set out to collect the facts relevant to the matter, there are infinitely many facts. Infinitely many facts. Meaning, what was the height of the messenger of the fourth company in the fifth battalion? What was the name of the mother of the adjutant of the second battalion? From which side was the sun coming? What was the structure of the ground there? Infinite—countless data points I can collect. Now when we gather data, we don’t gather infinite data. If we gathered infinite data, we would never finish gathering it, and we also wouldn’t know what to do with the data, meaning how to generalize it or what to do. Yes, too much information is information we have no ability to use. Therefore we really cannot—his description goes like this—we cannot collect the facts before we have some idea what the theory emerging from those facts might be. In other words, I already know in advance that the name of the mother of the adjutant of the second battalion is not going to be relevant. It is a fact, but there’s no point in dealing with it; it’s not relevant. How do I know that it isn’t relevant if I don’t yet know how battles are won—that is, which parameters influence victory in battle? I don’t know. So if I don’t know that, then ostensibly I ought to collect all the facts; I have no way to filter which facts are relevant and which are not. But clearly, if I collected all the facts, as I said, then nothing could be done. I would just keep collecting facts all the time until I died, and afterward others would continue collecting the facts because there are infinitely many facts. Therefore it is clear that we in fact filter the facts we collect. But how can we perform that filtering? After all, that filtering is theory-dependent. In other words, if victory in battle is caused by troop morale, then I understand that it is worthwhile to collect facts concerning the morale of the soldiers on all sides. If it depends on the quality of equipment, then I will also collect facts about the quality of the equipment. If it depends on mothers, on the names of the mothers, on the mothers’ age, on distance from home, on the nature of the terrain, then I will collect those facts. Therefore, what determines which facts are relevant is the theory. But I don’t know the theory until I have collected the facts. I need to collect the facts and only then will I build the theory. So there is a kind of vicious circle here that there seems to be no way out of. I need to know the theory in order to know which facts to collect, but before I have collected the facts I cannot know the theory; I build the theory from the facts. So something here cannot get started. The same thing appears in Carl Hempel’s book on the philosophy of science, which accompanies the Open University course Introduction to the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences or Philosophy of Science, I don’t remember exactly what it’s called. There he describes a similar phenomenon. He gives the example of a doctor in a hospital in Austria, I think, or Hungary, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire somewhere—Semmelweis, a Jew—who was head of a maternity ward. There was another maternity ward there too, and in Semmelweis’s ward the mortality of women giving birth was higher than in the second ward. And they decided to try to examine, by a process of elimination—meaning, compare what happened in the two wards and try to draw conclusions about what caused the higher mortality in Semmelweis’s ward. The problem was that they did not know which facts to collect, because they had no idea what caused the deaths. So there is a fascinating description there of how they collected facts. You won’t believe which facts they collected there. They collected the sound of the priest’s bell as he passed through the ward every morning, the direction of the windows, the size of the windows, the age of the doctors—I don’t remember exactly—completely bizarre facts, because they didn’t have the faintest idea which facts might be relevant in explaining mortality from something they didn’t know. They didn’t know what the women were dying from. At a certain point they decided to examine the students. In other words, students came to treat patients in the ward, to train, and in Semmelweis’s ward the students who came arrived immediately after a pathology lesson. They had dissected corpses, and then the hypothesis arose that they had not washed their hands after dissecting the corpses, and that those infections were what killed the women in childbirth. In the second ward the students did not come after pathology, so that was the parameter they found that distinguished between the two wards, and indeed after they told the students to disinfect their hands, the mortality dropped, and they understood that this was apparently the determining factor. But that was sheer luck. It was sheer luck because why on earth should one notice precisely that fact? There could be infinitely many other facts, and clearly behind this sheer luck sat some intuition—perhaps one they were not even aware of—that clean hands might be relevant to the mortality of women in childbirth, the clean hands of those treating them. Okay? They still didn’t know there about microorganisms and bacteria and things of that kind, so they had no idea. In other words, it sounds like witchcraft—to wash hands before treating patients. But they tried it and it worked. And then they concluded that puerperal fever was caused by some microorganisms from the hands, from the contamination on the students’ hands, and so on. These two examples, one from history and one from medicine, illustrate the same idea. And the idea is that collecting facts, if I am not equipped with a theory, is a shot in the dark. There are infinitely many facts, and I have no way of knowing which facts to collect. On the other hand, the theory is built on the basis of the facts I collected. If I don’t know how to collect facts, I can’t build the theory, and so I can’t collect the facts, and of course I’m stuck. So how do we nevertheless make progress? We make progress because, even before we know the theory of what causes maternal mortality or what causes victory in battle, we have some intuitive ideas of what the theory might be, or what it won’t be. We have a certain intuition about which facts will be relevant and which facts will not be relevant, even though we have no idea what the theory is, and if someone asks us we won’t know what to say about it. But we have some kind of intuition that tells us, guides us in some way, tells us which facts might be relevant and which facts are probably not relevant. Of course one can make mistakes. But there is still some kind of guidance here that helps us move forward. And this really means that before I know the theory, before I have made the generalization on the basis of the facts, I already have some intuition that helps me collect the relevant facts and decide which generalization to make. And that is a very clear indication of the fact—almost a proof of it—that when we make a generalization and when we collect facts, it is not just a shot in the dark. We have some intuitive guidance; our intuition directs us to the relevant facts and to the correct generalizations. And this strengthens what I said last time, that indeed the act of generalization—because usually, as I said, Bacon says first observation and afterward generalization—no, it is hard to separate those two things. The generalization accompanies the observations. I need to understand which facts to observe, and the generalization in fact dictates, or at least helps me orient myself toward, relevant facts and ignore irrelevant ones. Therefore it is impossible to divide scientific work into two such stages: first collect facts and then make generalizations. When you collect the facts, you already have certain ideas of what the generalization here will be. And how does that happen? I claim it happens because generalization is the result of contemplation, not of thought. I look at the world and get some impression of what the generalization here might be, and gradually it becomes more and more crystallized until I understand that this is probably the correct generalization. Again, this is not a process that leads me with certainty to the right answer, but neither is it a shot in the dark. In other words, it’s not worthless. It gives me some direction, it helps me. I still need to cross-check information, test myself; I’m not always right. But it does at least help me move forward, because without such guidance I would just go in circles and collect infinite facts and facts and facts. And collect infinite facts and facts and facts and facts and never be able to get anywhere. Rabbi, Rabbi?
[Speaker B] Yes. Rabbi, isn’t it almost inevitable that what the Rabbi is saying is true, because after all evolution obviously created our intuitions, not out of the blue, but so that we would be connected to the world,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] we are part of the world, and that’s
[Speaker B] absolutely necessary, intuition, for our survival. It almost follows that it would be so, and if it weren’t so we’d be surprised.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, the accepted view is that intuition is basically the result of accumulated experience, often unconscious, but somehow that accumulated experience organizes the neurons in my head, and that’s what builds my intuitions. I—it’s clear that there’s something to that, but on the other hand it’s also clear that this cannot be the whole answer, and I’ll tell you why: because when I accumulate those intuitions over the course of accumulated experience, even at the unconscious level, the very same problem I pointed out here remains. How do I know how to generalize from those cases I encountered before? After all, the cases I encountered before are particular cases, and in order to derive from them a general insight I need to make a generalization, and again all this happens unconsciously, my neural network somehow organizes itself, but that generalization can be made in infinitely many ways, so why do I make precisely these generalizations, and how are they in fact effective? In other words…
[Speaker B] But I’m asking evolutionarily—isn’t that almost to be expected?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m arguing that it isn’t. Why not? Because evolution was not—evolution was not here. If
[Speaker B] if we didn’t have intuition that was in some way fitted to actual reality, then we would survive less, and therefore those who had intuition survived more.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a different argument. Earlier I was talking about an argument…
[Speaker B] That’s what I mean. I mean the argument that evolution seemingly makes necessary and expected—or let’s say expected—that our intuitions would be fruitful.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree very partially. That’s what I discussed when I spoke in the fourth talk in The First Existent; I deal there at length with that argument, and I claim that it too is not sufficient. First, because intuition itself—we derived evolution, sorry, not intuition—from the scientific process. Evolution itself we derived from the scientific process. Now if my trust in the scientific process is based on evolution, then how did I have trust before I knew about evolution?
[Speaker B] No, that’s really hairsplitting, Rabbi. Since the dawn of our consciousness we’re used to trusting our intuition. Now, when we can reflect, we’ve matured and heard about evolution, now we give it an explanation. Even without the explanation it works; it’s just that now we understand it, so the explanation is almost inevitable.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, and that’s what I’m saying—I don’t agree. I don’t agree because, first of all, this trust was also present in the seventeenth century, and if you had asked a person at that time, “Why do you trust your senses?” he would have said, “What do you mean? Obviously, because my senses reflect reality,” perhaps he wouldn’t even understand your question. If you ask people today in the twentieth century, you’ll get the same answer, the same answer. Their trust is not based on evolution in terms of the reasoning they give you—not what actually happened. Now as for what really happens—not the account people would give you if you asked them, but what really happened—you’re claiming that in practice evolution built this, even if people were not aware of it. So as I said earlier, even if evolution built this unconsciously, you still can’t escape the fact that there are infinitely many possibilities you have to pass through before you get to the correct possibility. Evolution too would have left us in the state of not knowing anything, like the first organism that came into being; we wouldn’t have been able to progress. When you’re testing infinitely many possibilities, only one of which is correct, or very few of which are correct, evolution has no way to progress.
[Speaker B] You need to sort
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the possibilities on the table in such a way that, say, I don’t know, a thousand remain, and one of them is correct, and then evolutionary progress is possible.
[Speaker B] But the experience of most human beings in the world is limited, relatively limited, not infinite. And our encounters with understanding reality—there is a finite number of ways to generalize. Wait—but the challenges in reality that the human creature encounters are fairly finite. Very many, but finite. And since evolution imprinted in us the sense of what is right in the interpretation of that reality, therefore we choose from among the many possibilities the right choices. I don’t agree.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t agree because I’m not talking now about a conscious process. I agree with you—I’m talking about an unconscious process. But even in the unconscious process, after you’ve encountered several cases, no matter how many there are, there are infinitely many possibilities for generalizing from those cases, for generating a general law—infinitely many. Now the question is which of the possibilities will, say, emerge. If infinitely many possibilities emerge, then we already know the answer in advance.
[Speaker B] It’s like that midrash about the baby who really knows everything—the Torah and the whole world—before he’s born, and then they make him forget it, and he has to reconstruct it. Really we’re reconstructing what we already know in advance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so if we know it in advance unconsciously, where does it come from? Where does it come from?
[Speaker B] Evolution, because evolution imprinted it in us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Evolution cannot produce it. Why not? Because it cannot select one or two possibilities out of infinitely many.
[Speaker B] Only those few who thought of the right possibilities survived.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But they wouldn’t. Say you have a thousand people and infinitely many possibilities. All thousand would die. Because what are the chances that one of those thousand would hit upon one correct possibility out of infinitely many? All thousand would become extinct. It’s clear that some kind of sorting is being done that is not blind statistical sorting. Otherwise it simply could not work. In a moment I’ll present this from another angle.
[Speaker B] So I’ll ask the Rabbi: where does this wonderful intuition come from?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I claim that it comes from our structure and of course from our soul. In other words, the structure—say, when you build…
[Speaker B] Then we don’t really disagree. The Rabbi admits that it is something imprinted in us from the beginning of our existence. Call it evolution, call it God,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] call it some other theory. No, but the question is whether this thing that is imprinted in us really leads us to correct conclusions, or whether it deceives us?
[Speaker B] No, but I’m saying: the fact that we can guess, or sense with the eyes of the intellect as the Rabbi says, the right things—that is already imprinted in us beforehand. Where it comes from, what difference does it make?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Important?
[Speaker B] Evolution, God, some other explanation.
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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, I have no problem with that, I’m just saying that evolution by itself can’t explain this. It can’t explain it. Obviously it has some role in this matter. It’s like what people talk about when you train a neural network. Okay? When you train a neural network, people say: look, you give the network examples, you don’t tell it anything. You give it examples, and the fact is that it organizes itself in such a way that it manages to make the right generalization, because in the next examples it will in fact give you a more or less correct answer. That’s not precise, because when you train it, you’re putting into it information that you have already processed, meaning information that already exists in you. You processed it with your own eyes. The network isn’t naked; you build the network, and you’re also the one who trains it. You also tell it which example is correct and which example is not correct, at least in supervised learning. So this is not a process that can be explained as a completely blind process. In my opinion, that’s statistically impossible. But I’ll try to present this from another angle. Look, I’ve talked about this in the past too. As a result of the problems I described, there’s a dispute in the philosophy of science that takes different forms and sheds different forms, but basically it usually revolves around the same issue, in different formulations, and that is how to relate to the laws of nature, to the products of our generalizations. There are views that say, precisely because of Hume’s and Kant’s problems, and because there really is no convincing solution to these problems, there are views that say that the laws of nature are not claims about the world; they’re a statement about me. Meaning: it is convenient for me to organize the facts I’ve encountered in these patterns, and I am not claiming that these really are the patterns according to which the world itself operates. But it’s convenient for me to use that. That’s one view. A second view is the more natural, naive view, which says: no, of course, the laws of nature are our discoveries about the world. The laws of nature describe how the world itself operates; this is not a statement about me, it’s a statement about the world. Of course, the second approach has to answer Hume’s and Kant’s difficulties. Meaning, you believe in your generalization, in the general laws that you arrived at by means of generalization, and the question is: what justifies that? The fact that you believe is very nice, but the question is what justifies it. Maybe it’s just an illusion. So indeed the first approach says: look, the fact that I believe—I don’t really believe it, and I do believe it but it’s an illusion. You don’t need to believe it. Rather, for the time being, this is how the facts get organized for me; this is my form of thought. You see the similarity to Kant. This is my form of thought; I use my form of thought to organize the examples, and as long as it works, that’s fine. So the first approach—I’m following Zeev Bechler here, in his books, especially the book Three Copernican Revolutions—he calls the first approach actualism and the second one informativism. Actualism means that what is real is what is present actually before my senses, what I observed directly. Or in other words, only the sample, because I saw the sample. The general law—I have no way to know whether it is correct or not. I use it because that’s how my thinking is built, and why not? It’s more convenient for me to organize the facts in that way, but this is not a claim about the world. That is the actualist view. Meaning, things that are not present actually before my eyes are not true. I can use them because it’s convenient for me, but I cannot claim that they correctly describe the world. Only what is actually before my eyes can I say is true in the world itself. So if I observed some object falling to the earth, I can know that that object at that time fell to the earth. That is actual, before my eyes. Any further conclusion I draw from that—that is already information, and information is on my own private account; that is, I have no justification to claim that this is correct information about the world. The informativist argues: no, the information too—not only the things that are present actually, but also the things I add, the generalizations I make—those too are valid claims about the world. Okay? Now, these two views struggle with one another in the arena of philosophy, mainly philosophy of science or of cognition, epistemology, in various forms. And indeed one of the perhaps well-known expressions of this difficulty, of what leads to actualism, is Popper’s thesis of falsifiability. Popper basically argued that a scientific theory is not a theory that has been proven; it isn’t even a theory that can be proven, because a theory cannot be proven. A scientific theory is a theory that can be refuted, that can be put to a test of falsification. If it has been refuted, then it is an incorrect scientific theory. If it has not been refuted, then it is a scientific theory that has not yet been refuted. You can call it true or not, but really it is more precise to say that it has not yet been refuted. For example, the theory that all ravens are black—there is no way to prove it, because you can’t know that you have observed all ravens. There could always be more ravens that you haven’t observed. In contrast, you can refute it, because if you find one raven that is purple, then you have refuted that theory, because it is not true that all ravens are black. There is an asymmetry between proof and refutation in scientific theories. Therefore, says Popper, a scientific theory is a theory that you can subject to a test of refutation. Meaning, you can design an experiment whose result would refute the theory. If not—if you performed the experiment and the theory was not refuted—then one can continue using it, because it has not yet been refuted. But if it has been refuted, you have to throw it out and look for another theory. What is Popper really saying? If you take this to extreme formulations—there are various formulations in his writings—but if you take it to the extreme formulations, then basically what Popper is saying is that you can never say that a certain theory is true. You can say that it has not yet been refuted, that’s all. Or in other words, the theory is not a claim about the world. You cannot say that it is true, that it describes the world. All you can say is that so far you have not encountered any fact that contradicts this theory. Or in other words, the theory is the most efficient way for me to organize the facts I have encountered, but it is not a claim about the world.
[Speaker C] Did Popper also make that claim against his own theory?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not against his own theory; that’s what he argues.
[Speaker C] No, what he argues is that every theory that hasn’t yet been refuted is merely not yet refuted. That’s his theory. Maybe that too is a theory that we’ll end up refuting.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that theory is a normative theory, not a factual theory. He is speaking about theories that deal with facts, scientific theories. His claim is a meta-scientific claim, not a scientific claim. It is a claim about what should be called science, so there’s nothing here to refute or confirm.
[Speaker C] Yes, I mean to say: if it somehow turns out that we become capable of proving some theory with certainty.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How could such a thing turn out? I don’t know. A theory can’t be proven. There’s no way to prove a theory. A theory always speaks about infinitely many facts; you have never observed infinitely many facts, neither in the future nor in the past nor throughout the whole world, so it simply won’t happen. Theoretically, if I were to observe all the facts, then indeed. Let’s say there is some theory that doesn’t concern infinitely many facts but only a million, and we all enlist in the task and observe all one million cases to which the theory refers, and we succeed in seeing that it is indeed correct. Even that would not topple Popper.
[Speaker B] Then it’s no longer a theory; it’s just an observation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, it’s no longer a theory; it’s simply a sack of facts. That’s all. By definition, a theory always concerns more cases besides the cases I’ve encountered. Therefore I think this is an analytic claim, Popper’s claim. It’s not a claim you can refute by experiment. It’s not a scientific claim; it doesn’t deal with facts. It deals with scientific normativity. What is entitled to be called science and what is not entitled to be called science. So that is the actualist direction. Now, the arguments between actualists and informativists rage, as I said, quite a lot, and they are generally treated as philosophical arguments. Look at Bechler’s book. I spoke with him after I read his book, and I told him that the main point is missing from the book. I agree with his analysis, but the main point is missing. He advocates informativism very enthusiastically, and he explains what absurdities result if we adopt actualism. But he did not explain what justifies informativism—meaning, what justifies trusting our generalizations? After all, the basic problem with which the whole discussion begins—there is no justification anywhere in his book. All his arguments are basically philosophical arguments that actualism is intolerable, it’s annoying, he doesn’t quite know exactly what to call it—but not that it is incorrect. Meaning, nowhere—not anywhere—will you find a concrete argument in favor of informativism in that whole book, even though the book is meant to support informativism and attack actualism. Therefore I told him he had done half the job. And of course he did not do the second half, and not for nothing, because the second half requires my mysticism. The mysticism that says that intuition is a cognitive tool, and that you can actually see the generalizations. A regular philosopher of science usually won’t accept such things. In any case, what happens is this: why do people all think that basically the dispute is a philosophical one that cannot be decided? Because the whole conduct of science
[Speaker B] is carried out
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] exactly the same way whether you are an actualist or an informativist. What do I mean? When we want to build a scientific theory, both the actualist and the informativist recommend that we proceed in exactly the same way.
[Speaker C] Gather
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] certain facts, generalize them into a general law, and that is the scientific law. Now take the scientific law and subject it to a test of refutation, like Popper. Meaning, perform an experiment and see whether this experiment confirms the theory or
[Speaker C] refutes the theory.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If this experiment
[Speaker C] refutes
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the theory, we throw out the theory and look for another one. If the experiment confirms the theory, then we stay with it. This whole description is accepted both by the actualist and by the informativist. The difference between them is only in the question of what meaning we give to each such stage. The actualist will say that the generalization we make on the basis of the facts is a statement about us and not about the world. And the informativist will say that it is a statement about the world. Then afterward, if there was—if there was an experiment that refuted the theory, both agree that the theory must be thrown out and another one sought, but for different reasons. The informativist will say the theory must be thrown out because it has turned out to be incorrect. The actualist will say: it was never correct in the first place. It needs to be thrown out because it no longer organizes all the facts for me, so what’s the point? I want a theory that organizes all the facts. If there is one fact that contradicts the theory, that means the theory no longer organizes all the facts I know, so there is no point in using it. Not because it is incorrect, but because there is no point in using it; it is not efficient. It was never correct, but it was efficient until it was refuted and stopped being efficient. Okay? And therefore the whole scientific process of replacing theories, building theories, refutation, generalization, and all those things, is completely identical in the actualist picture and in the informativist picture. There is no difference. And therefore this dispute seems so frustrating, because there is no way to decide it. You think this way, he thinks that way. I claim it’s a statement about me; you claim it’s a statement about the world. Okay, but we behave the same way. We both work in laboratories in the same way. We both conduct ourselves in the world in exactly the same way.
[Speaker B] Could the Rabbi explain again what the informativist position is?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Informativism says that… a generalization is a claim about the world, not about me. A generalization contains an addition of information, after all; it is a synthetic statement. Informativism is basically what I called syntheticity. Meaning, it contains information beyond the information found in the observations I made, because I am speaking about a whole class of events, not only the events I observed. So in fact it contains a great deal of additional information, a great deal of information beyond the empirical information that was in my possession. The informativist will say: true, but I treat that information as reliable information. This really is my claim; this is indeed how the world operates. And the actualist will say: no, there is no additional information here; it is just convenient for me to handle the facts known to me by way of general laws, general theories, because that is how our brain is built. And as long as it has not been refuted, then why not use tools that are convenient for me to use? That’s all.
[Speaker D] Rabbi, just a question for a moment. Does the actualist say this only about big theories, or also about observation, for example—things that we grasp with our senses?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, the opposite. He says that about things we observed directly—this is present actually before my eyes—so that, yes. Meaning, he accepts the reliability of the senses. This is basically extreme empiricism. Meaning, he accepts the reliability of the senses; everything beyond what I saw with my senses is on my own private responsibility.
[Speaker D] But why is that? I mean, for example, just as I trust a person until he proves to me that he is not trustworthy, and I do think he is trustworthy—why not do the same with scientific theories?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand. The same thing—regarding a person too he will tell you the same thing.
[Speaker D] But I can hold a claim about a certain person—for example, a presumption that a person doesn’t lie. I really think he doesn’t lie, even though it could be that at some point he’ll betray that trust.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so you also really think that two bodies with mass attract one another. They’re all illusions. It’s simply the structure of my brain.
[Speaker D] But why—why does he think that’s an illusion, and he doesn’t think that, for example, what he
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] sees with his eyes is an illusion? But there is
[Speaker D] intuition—why doesn’t he accept that? No, he doesn’t, he doesn’t
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] accept intuition as a source of information about the world. Only observations. That’s what I said: it’s extreme empiricism.
[Speaker D] But isn’t that skepticism?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there is a large measure of skepticism here. Every empiricist is a great skeptic.
[Speaker D] And how does he justify that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is such a worldwide movement of skepticism, yes; there are skeptics in Israel too. The skeptics are basically empiricists.
[Speaker D] Yes, but how does he justify this—that every sensation he has, an empirical sensation, so to speak, that he accepts, but intuitive sensations he does not accept?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, what’s the difference? From his point of view it’s not sensation. For him, empiricism is not a feeling. What the senses show is sensing, not feeling.
[Speaker B] And how does he make a generalization?
[Speaker D] But why does he trust that? Why does he trust that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He does—it’s not that—he does make generalizations because that’s how it is convenient for him to work, but if you ask him whether that generalization is really correct, meaning, whether it describes the facts in the world—no, of course not.
[Speaker B] Is that the actualist or the informativist? The actualist. No, but what does the informativist say about the generalization?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The informativist says: no, I trust my generalization. Yes, I think this is what is happening in the world. And by virtue of what? By virtue of my trusting my intuitions.
[Speaker B] He needs intuition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I said: you won’t find the basis for informativism in Bechler. The question still stands: by virtue of what? As you asked. It’s nice that you trust your generalizations, the additional information that you create by means of your thinking, but by virtue of what? Why?
[Speaker D] Rabbi, but couldn’t one raise the exact same difficulty against the empiricist: by virtue of what do you know that your senses aren’t deceiving you and faking what you see?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, correct. That is a well-known claim against empiricists. For some reason they decide that the senses are not subject to that doubt. Regarding the senses, it’s obvious. Everything beyond that is in doubt. It’s the same among the positivists too—yes, the extreme empiricists—the same thing. You can ask: wait a second, why do you believe observations? Maybe the senses deceive us, maybe we’re just imagining, maybe there is no world at all. Yes, Berkeley was also an empiricist and he thought there is no world at all, that everything exists only within us inwardly. So what will they answer? Just that—they assume this is beyond any doubt. And everything else is our speculation. In any case, what is frustrating in this debate is that apparently there is no way to decide it. No way to decide it, because science proceeds in exactly the same way whether you are operating within an actualist framework or within an informativist framework. Therefore the arguments are endless philosophical skirmishes—or certain fashions—but there is no real way to decide it. That’s how it is generally thought. Now, what I want to claim is that yes, at least in a certain sense, there is a way to decide it. And in order to do that, I want—wait, I want to formulate the dispute differently. One second. I can’t manage to see—just a moment. I can’t manage to see. There’s something on the screen here and I can’t share it, I’m not sure why. I’ll just delete everything else. Ah. There, okay. Now I want to reformulate the dispute. Look, here is a graph, and this graph describes a dependence between force and acceleration, force and acceleration, okay? Newton’s second law states that there is a direct proportionality and F, force, equals mass times acceleration. Meaning, if I apply force at a certain level, I will get acceleration at a corresponding level. A higher force, a higher acceleration; the slope of the graph is basically the mass. Okay, so F equals MA. The points—wait, yes—the hollow points, here: one, two, three, four, five, represent an experiment. I conducted five experiments and found the five points one, two, three, four, and five. Each such point marks a certain acceleration and has a corresponding force. This is a smaller acceleration, a smaller force; a slightly larger acceleration, a corresponding force; and so on. Okay? I made five measurements, put these five measurements on the graph. And now what I want is to make a generalization. What does it mean to make a generalization? To draw the graph itself. Ignore for the moment the graphs drawn here, both the solid one and the dashed one. I have only these five circular points, these hollow ones—that’s all I have. Now I ask: what is the graph? Meaning, what is the solid line that stitches together all the points? Now everyone of course knows that in such a case we’ll draw the straight line. The straight line is basically the simplest line that stitches together these five points. And then in effect we have confirmed Newton’s second law, that F=MA, that there is a direct relation between force and acceleration. Now someone will come and say: yes, but actually I can stitch together these five points in many additional ways. For example, the dashed line also stitches together all five of these points. You see? It passes through this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. And of course you can understand that there are infinitely many such lines, all of which will stitch together these five points. So who told us that the straight solid line I drew is really the correct line? Usually the answer is that it is the simplest line. And if the straight line is simpler than the curved line, it is simpler in mathematical senses; there are simply fewer parameters here. A straight line has only one or two parameters, if you like, Y=AX+B, so there are only two parameters. A parabola already has three parameters, and so on. Meaning, every curved line has more parameters, therefore the straight line is the simplest. And indeed we usually choose—in fact always choose—that in such a situation the generalization will be described by the straight line. That’s what everyone does. Now I return to the actualist and the informativist. Both will agree that one should draw the straight line here through these five points. Again, ignore for the moment the dashed line and the black points. I’m speaking only about the hollow points and the straight line, okay? So if these five hollow points are the measurement results, both the actualist and the informativist will draw the straight line as their generalization. You understand that drawing the graph is basically what is called making a generalization. The five cases are my sample, and now I want to find the general law—for every acceleration or every force, what will the acceleration be—so I draw a line. Which line is the correct one? That is the generalization. Which is the correct generalization? In this case everyone will agree that it is the straight line. Now what will the difference be? The difference will be that according to the actualist, he will say: look, the straight line is not the correct line, but it is the simplest line and the most convenient for me to organize the facts by means of it, and therefore I choose that line. As long as I have nothing that contradicts it, why not use the simplest description? It is the most convenient for me. Not because it is the truest. Simplicity has nothing to do with truth. Simple is simply simple in my eyes. That’s how my thought is built; that is what seems simple to me. It has no connection whatever to truth, says the actualist. Fine, I agree, it has nothing to do with truth, and still the law of nature will be the straight line. Why? Because the law of nature is a statement about me, not about the world. And this is the simplest way for me to describe the set of facts available to me, the five hollow circles.
[Speaker B] But why is what’s convenient for you the thing worth doing? Maybe you want to be rewarded for your effort, and you specifically want to seek out the complicated and difficult way, and then you feel good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you want to, health to you, but he wants to do things in the simplest possible way, because why use a complicated tool if you have a simple one? Fine. Why not? If you want to be a different kind of actualist, health to you, that’s perfectly fine.
[Speaker B] But it’s a fact that we all nevertheless choose the simple one. Why? Because we’re built for laziness, so to speak?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The actualist will say because that is how we are used to thinking; that is the structure of our thought. And the informativist will say: no, because in my eyes the simple is an indication of the correct. It is most reasonable that this is the correct law—that is what the informativist claims. And then the actualist will of course ask: how do you know? All the information in your possession is these five hollow circles. Those circles can be explained in infinitely many ways, not only with the straight line. The fact that you choose the straight line is only because your way of being built makes it most convenient to do it that way. But there is no empirical basis for that; it really cannot be a claim about the world, so argues the actualist. And apparently justifiably. On the other hand, as Kant says, we all understand that the straight line is the correct line. And the actualist can chatter until tomorrow—he too thinks it is the correct line. The problem is, I have no way to justify that. And therefore the actualist’s question is a good question. But on the other hand, I don’t think there is anyone on earth—actualists are philosophers; scientists are not actualists—there is no one on earth who doesn’t really believe that the straight line is the correct line, again, not necessarily with certainty, but with the highest probability. Okay? So what is going on here? There is something that we think is correct but for which we have no justification. That is exactly the question Kant asked, only now I’m translating it into this example. Basically Kant will say: look, the straight line is the correct line, but—and this is a synthetic a priori judgment—since there are other lines that also satisfy all the empirical tests, the choice of the straight line is not empirical, it is a priori. On the other hand, it is synthetic because it contains some information, say, about accelerations that I did not test. So this is a synthetic a priori judgment. Kant says: but I do accept this judgment, and now I am looking for what could justify it. The actualist will say: no, of course not, I do not accept that. I’ll use it because it is most convenient for me, but I do not claim that this is really how the world behaves, that there is really a direct relation between force and acceleration in other cases that I did not measure. Now let’s say we do another experiment, and say—look at experiment six here. We apply to a body, say, we bring it to acceleration six and check what force did that. Usually it works the other way around—we apply force and check what the acceleration is—but it’s more convenient for me to present it this way. So let’s say we arrive at some acceleration six, and we ask what the force was. If it turns out that the force is this one, here, then we have corroborated the theory, right? What does it mean that we corroborated it? The informativist will say: now it has turned out that the probability it is correct is higher, because it is based on six facts and not five. The actualist will say: no, the theory simply has not yet been refuted; meaning, in this case too the theory has still not been refuted, that’s all. And of course you understand that even if the result here were this one, one could still draw infinitely many lines through these six points—the five hollow ones and this black one—so the actualist’s argument still stands even after this experiment. What will happen if this experiment gives me this result, meaning that this would be the force at acceleration six—not this, not on the straight line but here? Then both the actualist and the informativist will say: the straight line has to be thrown out; it is not correct. Okay? That’s not entirely precise, never mind, but yes, we’ll make some abstraction. Usually if there is one deviation, you don’t always throw out the general law, but that’s what Thomas Kuhn argued. But never mind, right now I’m only illustrating the logic. So if this is the result that came out, both the actualist and the informativist will throw out the straight line. The actualist will throw out the straight line because it is no longer efficient; it doesn’t explain all the facts. The informativist will throw out the straight line because it is no longer correct. But fine—and still, in practice, both will do the same thing, behave in the same way. Therefore we in fact have no empirical way to decide between actualism and informativism; it will remain a philosophical dispute. No experiment you perform can decide it. I’ll do another experiment and it will also come out this way, and I’ll do another experiment and it will also come out this way. It changes nothing. The actualist will still say: this is just a case, a successful case, everything falls on a straight line, and therefore very good, I’ll use the straight line, but I have no indication that the straight line is specifically the correct line. Any number of points you present, I can stitch together.
[Speaker B] So still, I’m going back to the questions that have been asked here several times already. How does he get on an airplane? How does he risk his life?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait, one second, one second. I’ll get there, I’ll get there. I don’t have an answer; I’ll get to the fact that I don’t have an answer. So that is the picture, and therefore apparently a dead-end problem. Now I want to argue that there actually is a decision here, and that one can decide in favor of informativism. And not only can one decide in favor of informativism, but the decision will be empirical. In other words, these two theories are scientific theories, and I can refute them, put them to an experimental test. How? On the face of it, everything I have described until now shows that this is not true. Any experiment I perform will neither refute nor confirm either of the two theories. So how can it? My answer is the following. Now look—suppose we have these five hollow points, okay? And now I conduct experiment seven. Now before I perform the experiment, I ask the actualist: tell me, what is the probability that the result will be here? And not here, for example, or any other place, doesn’t matter. What is the probability that it will fall here on the straight line? What is the actualist supposed to answer? Zero. Right? There are infinitely many possible lines, all the lines that stitch together these six points, all infinitely many lines; every one of them will give a different result for acceleration seven. The probability that it will fall specifically here is zero, because this is one line out of infinitely many. Infinitely many possible lines. Ask the informativist: what is the probability that the result of the experiment will fall here? He will say: look, I don’t know, but not zero. Thirty percent, fifty percent, seventy percent, something. Not certain, but also not zero. Okay? Because the informativist does not believe absolutely in his generalizations. He only claims that generalizations are not a shot in the dark. The actualist claims that the generalization has no status at all; it’s a shot in the dark. You could have generalized in any form whatsoever. The generalization of the straight line has no status compared to any other generalization you might make. So now we actually have a difference that I can already translate into statistics. The actualist will say: the probability that experiment seven will fall here is zero. The informativist says: no, the probability is not zero; I don’t know, some tens of percent, but not zero. Okay? Now all that remains for me is simply to perform several experiments and check. If all these experiments fall on the straight line, then that means the actualist is not right. Because again and again an event is happening whose probability is zero. The possibility that such a thing is accidental is with a very low probability. It could be accidental; there is no certainty. But the probability of that is very low. And if I generalize this even further, then I say the following: I’ll look at all the scientific experiments that have been carried out in the history of science from its beginning until today, and I’ll ask: every such experiment subjected some scientific theory to a test of refutation, right? Now I ask: how many of these experiments succeeded? Succeeded in the sense that they did not refute the scientific theory. I don’t know how many, but not zero percent. Let’s say forty percent—I’m just throwing out a number—some tens of percent, but not zero. Okay? That itself is evidence against the actualist. That is an empirical refutation of actualism. When I showed him that I performed experiments—experiments already carried out, not future experiments—and the fact that they succeeded, I’ll formulate it differently: according to the actualist, basically the course of science should have been that every time I build a theory, the next experiment refutes it; I build a new theory, the next experiment refutes it, and it always refutes. Every experiment ought to refute every theory, because the probability that the experiment will not refute the theory is zero. It can happen, but with a tiny probability, and therefore it should almost never happen. Now when you look at the history of science, it happens quite a bit that the experiment does not refute the theory. Again, I don’t know how to quantify it, but it is not zero percent of experiments that succeeded. If it were zero percent of experiments, today we would still have the science of Adam. The fact that science progresses, that theories succeed in being built, means that there are experiments that confirm the theories, that did not refute those theories. There is an evolution of scientific theories. Every experiment that refutes basically destroys the theory. So that means the history of science is empirical evidence against actualism. Or in another formulation, I say this: the history of science shows us that Occam’s razor, as a criterion of simplicity—that the straight line is the simplest—is not merely a methodological rule, as the actualist thinks, that this is only my way of deciding which theory to use but not that it is more correct. Rather, it is a true rule. Simplicity is an indication of correctness and not merely a methodological criterion for choosing the most effective, most efficient theory. No—it is a criterion for choosing the truest theory. Because otherwise almost all the experiments—all the experiments—should have failed. And that is not a correct description of the history of science. It is not true that all experiments fail. Now do you understand? It’s an interesting trick, because I manage to decide a philosophical dispute by empirical means. Which means, basically, that the dispute is not philosophical at all; it is a scientific dispute. Because clearly it can be decided by experiment. And not only can it be decided—it has been decided. Actualism is nonsense. Now again, I qualify that a bit, what I just said. Because the stubborn actualist can say: look, I don’t accept the statistical proof either; statistics too is a statement about us. So the fact that the probability is zero that this should happen—fine, the probability is zero, but it still happened, a successful case. Once he denies statistics as well, then indeed I have no way to prove to him that he is wrong. But it seems to me that then I would say: at least methodologically you need to adopt informativism and not actualism. That at least is as far as I can get by empirical tools. Beyond that we enter the world of total skepticism, and there I have no way of dealing with a total skeptic. Now I want to explain the meaning of the move I just made. Basically what I asked the actualist is exactly the question you asked earlier. Why do you get on an airplane? Or what justification do you have for getting on an airplane? Because what am I really saying? I’m saying: after all, we built theories, and those theories served us in building the airplane. Now I assume—Hume’s problem of induction—I assume that those theories also describe what will happen in future experiments, in future cases, because they are correct. You, as an actualist, are supposed to say: that is what happened until now, but generalizing to cases that will happen in the future is on your own private responsibility; there is no justification for it. They accept the Humean difficulties, yes, Hume’s attack on generalization. So if that is the case, then basically you should not get on an airplane. There is no—the probability that it will crash is almost one hundred percent. What is the probability that these laws will continue to work? Now of course the stubborn actualist, as I mentioned earlier, can say: okay, but staying on the ground is just as dangerous, because the ground could split open in another moment and swallow me, nothing is at all certain for me anymore about what will happen the next instant, so I just go along with whatever happens to be nested inside me.
[Speaker B] But if you get on, write a will first.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if you don’t get on, write a will too. He has to keep writing a will constantly about everything he does.
[Speaker B] So clearly he’s lying.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, exactly. And the claim is that when he gets on a plane he tells me stories that this isn’t really—it’s the most convenient theory for me, but there’s nothing true about this theory, it’s nonsense. You get on that plane because you trust that it really will reach its destination, that it won’t crash. The only thing is, you have no justification. So since you have no justification, you build some sort of constructions—and this is actualism—and no, it’s not the simplest theory, but that has nothing to do with whether it’s true. It’s nonsense; you yourself don’t believe it. Therefore all the questions you asked earlier are very good questions, I agree with them, and I think a true actualist has no answer to those questions. Still, we need to understand: okay, so basically I showed that informativism works. The question still is: how does this actually happen? After all, it has no empirical basis. How do I make the right generalizations? Now I’m ready to go back and talk about evolution and the questions we discussed before. I formulate this by means of intuition. That is, I claim that the generalization I make, I make from observing the world—I simply see it. When I look at that graph I showed you earlier, people usually think that when I draw the straight line, that’s a thought process. I think about what the simplest line is and I draw it. And the question of what is simplest is an intellectual question; it has nothing to do with empiricism. Empiricism gives me those five points that I measured, that’s it. From there on, the move to a general law is a move of thought, not of cognition. What I’m claiming is that that’s not correct. When I look at the world, I simply see that the straight line is the right line. I see it with the mind’s eye, not with the eyes. I understand that the straight line is the right one, but “understand” is a borrowed term in this context. It’s not a thought process, it’s a cognitive process. True, it isn’t done through the senses—it’s the mind’s eye—and I simply see that it’s true. Now this sounds terribly mystical, and therefore philosophers of science are very put off by formulations of this kind, but it seems to me that if you examine yourselves honestly—and if they examine themselves honestly too—you’ll all see that this is exactly the experience you’re having. When you look at it, it’s obvious to you that the straight line is the right line. There’s no one to whom this isn’t obvious. Now, the philosopher says: yes, it’s obvious to me, but there’s no justification for it, so if it’s obvious to me then apparently it’s an illusion. But no—it’s obvious to me because it’s true. So then what? So I say: why is it obvious to me? Apparently because I see that the straight line is the right one. Intuition is a kind of cognition. Here I’m connecting to what I said in the previous lecture. Now you’ll ask: fine, but cognition too can be doubted. Right, of course—certainly intellectual cognition. But here we return to the question that was rightly asked here earlier: the actualist also doesn’t doubt his sensory cognitions, only the generalizations we make on their basis. What I want to claim is that the generalizations too are in fact a kind of cognition. So if you accept your cognitions, and you’re not a complete skeptic who says there’s nothing at all, then you also have to accept the generalizations for that very same reason. I simply see. When you ask me, how do you believe what you see? My answer is: because it’s simply true. That’s it. What do you want from me? It is completely obvious to me that my eyes are a reliable tool, that they correctly reflect what is happening in the world. You ask how is that obvious to me? Because it’s obvious to me, period. What do you mean “how”? It’s obvious to me. So yes, that sounds like a terribly disappointing answer after this terribly convoluted move, but maybe it’s the only answer there is, and I think it’s a very strong answer. Because in the end, understand, every justification you propose for your scientific approach will ultimately rest on some assumptions, right? Every argument rests on assumptions. And those assumptions themselves you will ground in intuition. So here—I’ve given you directly the intuitive assumption that grounds this whole structure. There is no way to find a justification that isn’t based on assumptions that sit on intuition. There is no such possibility. We talked about this in the previous lecture, or the one before that. So there’s no reason to be disappointed and no reason to think there’s something—this isn’t mysticism. This is completely rational thinking. All rationalism rests on this. All rational and empirical thinking rests on this: that we trust what we see in the world, both with the senses and with the mind’s eye. And we see the generalizations, because otherwise there’s no justification at all for the fact that they prove themselves again and again. And now I can say, okay, maybe evolution built this into me—but only after I can justify that claim itself, the claim that this really is a reliable tool. Now I can offer the explanation that maybe evolution is what built this reliable tool in me, but first of all I need to decide that it really is a reliable tool. Okay.
[Speaker D] Can I ask a question for a second? Yes. If I’m not mistaken, Rogel Alpher once asked you this. It’s a question you hear a lot today—that supposedly a person is just a product of his native landscape, and intuition is only the result of the environment, the culture, and the education into which we were born, and therefore it’s subjective and we can’t really rely on it. What do you answer to that? What’s your proof that that isn’t true?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This whole lecture today was an answer to that. You want to tell me that if it’s just a product of my native landscape, then how do you explain the fact that my generalizations work in the next experiment I do? After all, I made the generalizations on the basis of experiments I already did. You can say this happened de facto—yes, it happened after the experiments had already taken place. But now I have a generalization, I do a new experiment, and it turns out that the new experiment fits the generalization I made earlier. If that generalization is only a product of my native landscape, there is no reason in the world that the next experiment should fit it.
[Speaker D] So you’re saying simply because it works?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. No—you’re asking whether it works. It’s not simply because it works. You’re asking whether it works; the answer is yes, it works. That means it isn’t just a product of my native landscape, but a perceptual tool, a reliable cognitive tool. It works.
[Speaker D] And another question: is there no rational explanation for why a generalization works? We just see that it does?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes—just as I have no rational explanation for why eyes work. I simply see. Why do I trust my eyes? Is there some rational explanation for that? No. It’s because it’s obvious to me that my eyes are a reliable tool, and if they show me something, I trust it.
[Speaker D] But induction—is that something we simply see?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s what I want to claim. Of course, we see it with a different kind of clarity than seeing with the eyes. Yes, it’s much less sharp and unambiguous and clear, and therefore there are more mistakes there and there can be disagreements, that’s all fine. I’m only claiming that this isn’t a shot in the dark, that it’s not just out of the blue. No—there is a tool here with a certain degree of reliability. Of course you have to cross-check and examine; it’s not certainty. But it’s a tool that definitely—we don’t have anything better than it. Okay.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, yes. From what I’ve looked at in Hume, I don’t think Hume thought the way the Rabbi said. He didn’t make the distinction between intuition and emotion. I also don’t think such a distinction needs to be made, but all he said was that we have no rational explanation for these generalizations; rather, it really comes from emotion, and emotion is right. I really believe in it and get on planes and all that, even though I have no rational justification. And that really is the Rabbi’s explanation—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Evolution,
[Speaker B] —for what happens.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We already had this argument in the previous lecture, but there’s no point.
[Speaker B] It’s not an argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you want to defend Hume, then fine, I have no problem. Hume isn’t the issue here. Perfectly fine, I agree with you. But I’m talking about the ideas; it doesn’t matter at the moment who the person is that holds them.
[Speaker B] In morality too he said the same thing. In morality too, after all, he says that it’s emotion—and he was a moral person and believed in morality, so he claimed that it was true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He was a moral person; he did not believe in morality.
[Speaker B] Then why was he willing to die for it? And why did he die for it? Because he thought it was true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is why does he get on a plane?
[Speaker B] Because he feels that it’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again—what does “feels” mean? But he himself explains that philosophically it’s not true.
[Speaker B] Then why do it? No—philosophically it isn’t true. No, what the Rabbi said, I think he agrees with what the Rabbi said. He just used a different formulation that—well, what difference does it make what he thought? I’m presenting the position.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. So if he said what I’m saying, that’s fine—then I have one more supporting argument.
[Speaker B] He didn’t distinguish between intuition and emotion, exactly like me, it seems to me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anyone who doesn’t distinguish between intuition and emotion is simply calling emotion “intuition,” that’s all. It’s semantics.
[Speaker B] The point is—I’ll tell the Rabbi why it’s not only semantics. The intellectual effort to create this artificial creature called intuition, in order to say that it lies in the depths of the intellect—and all this in order not to empower emotion—has the consequences that we see in our own day, which we spoke about in raised tones last week. This is the very severe consequence of that activity—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —this one.
[Speaker B] Because that is the result of when we asked ourselves: what could have saved Eichmann? After all, Eichmann said, “I’m a Kantian,” and he was right—he was a Kantian. I acted according to what I thought the categorical imperative required. What could have saved him? The answer is: if he had looked at the victims and felt your suffering, I promise the Rabbi he might have thought differently. If he had tried a little to give emotion a place. But he suppressed emotion. He looked—I know that he looked through the hole in the door of the gas chamber and saw, and did not allow his emotion to operate. And that commandant of Auschwitz said, “I admire him for having managed to suppress emotion, and I was ashamed that I didn’t go that way”—that’s what he writes in his autobiography. And that is the grave implication of what seems to be a semantic dispute between us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m completely with him.
[Speaker B] With Eichmann? Yes. Well, I admire the Rabbi for having the courage to say things bluntly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m completely with him—not in the sense that one should kill Jews. I think he was morally mistaken, not emotionally mistaken. But if your emotion goes against your conceptions, then you need to worry about the—
[Speaker B] What could have saved Eichmann? I’m asking the Rabbi: what could have saved Eichmann? He grew up according to the theories, accepted the theories, the basic assumptions of Hitler, and followed them. He has no morality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. It may be that nothing could have, and it may be that persuasion that he was wrong could have.
[Speaker B] Persuade him of what? He accepts the basic assumption that Jews are not human beings, that they are subhuman, that they are destroying the world and need to be exterminated.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t change a basic assumption? I discussed this in other series too—that even about basic assumptions one can conduct a discussion.
[Speaker B] True, but many times you reach some point—and then you can’t. Fine. What, would the Rabbi have signed the petition against Eichmann’s execution?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course not. Execute him. I too have a categorical imperative. Someone like Eichmann needs to be executed—what do you mean?
[Speaker B] But he’s not evil; he simply made a mistake—he happened to get a mistaken basic assumption. Now he already understands that it was a mistake; he also said, “Now I understand it was a mistake,” so everything is fine—go on your way in peace.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If he truly understood that it wasn’t okay, and there are no deterrence considerations and so on, then perhaps yes indeed—perhaps I really would acquit him.
[Speaker B] I too would acquit him, but for different reasons. Maybe all of us, if we were in his place, might have done the same thing, and that vengeance accomplished nothing; it brought us to where we are today. This choice of the path of vengeance brought us exactly to the terrible brokenness, the destruction of the state that is now unfolding by our own hands.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We won’t go back to that again. Fine. Another question or comment? Okay, Sabbath peace—good Sabbath, good news, I hope there won’t be too great a destruction. Happy New Year, may you be inscribed and sealed for good.
[Speaker B] Thank you very much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Goodbye.